Worth a Thousand Photographs
by gibbsheroic27
Summary: You don't remember Aunt Petunia ever talking about your mother. About Lily
1. Chapter 1

You are five, watching your Aunt carefully lower a glossy sheet of oddly shifting power towards a rather roaring fire. You were supposed to be dusting the dining table, the third on your morning list of chores, but the innocence of not yet beaten out of existence youthful curiousity drew you incautiously closer to the living room fire, the flames combining with the July heat to make the room beyond bearable.

You watch the flames slowly lick at the blur of red and green and black until nothing is left but ash, oddly mesmerized. Your cousin's shout rouses you at the same instant it causes your aunt to whip around abruptly from her own contemplation of the flames.

You barely have enough time to snatch one last glance at the fireplace because for an instant you could swear something moved. Then you can't think about anything for a long time.

Much later, gloom invading the slats of light from your grate, concealing the red and purple and pain haze surrounding you, you let yourself wonder at the fact your aunt-who can detect a nosy neighbor's surreptitious eye at 50 paces and is always, always right-neglected noticing you for so long. It is the first time you hear the work "freakishness" in your own thoughts, rather than from others.

As you drift painfully off even later, you take a moment to wonder why your aunt, in those moments between turning and screaming for Uncle Vernon because of course it was a weekend, of course, why your aunt reached up to brush something from the corner of her eye.

You are seventeen when you finally know the reason why.

You are thirty seven when your realize magic had very little to do with any of it at all.

L&amp;S

You are eleven when a half-giant who is quite possibly the nicest person you've ever met says the names "James and Lily Potter." You are eleven and it is the first time you have heard your mother's name.

You are eleven the first time you know what your mother's name was at all.

L&amp;S

You are seventeen and in someone else's head but not really because they're dead and the headmaster who lied about so many, many things says her name. Says "Lily." Just that, like it meant something. Like it meant everything. Like that was a surprise to him.

And that made you feel ashamed. Because it surprised you too.

You have heard her name many times over your scholastic career. At thirteen she was "your mother Lily." Your eyes are always "your mother's", or even "your mother Lily's."

At sixteen you've heard that so many times you're beyond sick of it.

Partly because that's all anyone ever says.

You are seventeen and in a dead man's mind and you suddenly realize you still only know your mother's name.

L&amp;S

You are still eleven when you sit in a dungeon trying your hardest to be good and quiet and unnoticeable, like you have all your life. It works as well as it ever did at the Dursley's, and you are left with the concrete certainty that Uncle Vernon actually was right, all these years, because someone besides his vile dog loving sister just agreed with him in the judgement that everything that has ever happened to you was your own fault.

And that shouldn't matter so much, because it's different here, it's different now, you're a hero here, you matter here. You've repeated that so many times to yourself in the week since your world was turned upside down by a half-giant on a giant rock in the middle of a stormy sea, hoping that this time, this time it will be real. This time, it will be true.

Sitting there, trying your hardest not to cower, fear slithering back into the edges of your mind from dark corners, you feel your desperate mantra drift ever further away in the realization that just because magic is real, doesn't make everything magically okay now.

L&amp;S

You are seventeen watching yourself watch your headmaster condemn you like a lamb for thanksgiving dinner and being called upon it by a man you have spent almost half your life learning how to hate by learning how to hate him.

You are seventeen and you wonder, for the first time in your memory, just for a moment, if that means you might actually be worth something more than a lamb.

You are seventeen when you start to wonder if just perhaps, you might just be worth something at all, after all.

L&amp;S

You are six and have just learned to read when you sneak into the school library at lunch and crack open the moldering and slightly soggy Webster dictionary perched precariously on a shelf just far enough above your head to be dangerous if you weren't abnormally strong for your small stature-no mean feat when doing 8 hours of chores on if-you-were-lucky-literally-a-crust-of-mouldy-bread-a-day.

You carefully lift the tome down with slight difficulty and quietly kneel, years of ingrained slap-enforced conditioning preventing furniture ever looking like a good option to the floor, even when you are relatively likely to be completely undisturbed.

You flip carefully through the sticky, greying pages, careful not to tear any of the pages any further, mouthing the as yet unfamiliar letters as they slowly squelch past your small stick-like fingers.

You find the word easily enough, carefully sounding out each letter, even though, until two weeks ago, you knew it better than your own name, because it was the only name you'd ever known.

It is the second week of September in your first year of primary and you have just read your first complete word.

F.R.E.A.K

L&amp;S

You are fifteen and have just broken into your professor's mind and then been summarily thrown out again, but not quickly enough.

The glass shattering around your head is somehow still less disturbing than the unpleasant realization that you have just slid into a chair without permission and isn't that ironic, that your whale of an uncle is still more terrifying than anyone you've ever encountered-megalomaniac mass murderers notwithstanding.

Still, all that pales in the face of the haunting realization you are caught up in that in that memory, you had a heck of a lot more in common with your most hated professor than with your own godfather, let alone your father. Even more disturbing perhaps, you are actually not sure you'd want it to be the other way around at all.

As you flee out into the passageway, your decrepit trainers slapping against the hard, slick stones, the omnipresent smell of perpetual damp reminding you of nothing but your old primary school library at midday in September, you can't help but wonder how old Snape was when he learned to use a dictionary.

L&amp;S

You don't hate your aunt. Petunia, that is. After you come of age, you make not further claim to the dog loving Marge.

Not that Petunia was ever any nicer to you; she spent your childhood figuring out ever more creative ways to attempt to maim you with kitchen utensils. Yet somehow, something about your aunt always stirs something inside your chest that has always been disturbingly dead in reference to Vernon and Dudley, ever since you were small. Why this is you never quite figure out, back then.

As a teenager, watching Mrs. Weasley squeeze the life near out of Ron after your latest close call with deadly arachnids, you chalk it all up to the wish for a tangible maternal figure.

Three years older and only slightly taller, you gaze at a picture of your mother laughing at something and you remember tears and flames and flashes of red and you think you finally know the answer.

L&amp;S

You forget the black until you are seventeen, standing on the shores of the center of the black lake, gazing on an austere black headstone, tears of your own slowly dripping down onto the ground, mingling with the torrential rain lending rather a cinematic atmosphere to the vista.

And standing in that downpour trying your level best to catch your death of pneumonia, you finally remember that old photograph in its entirety. Remember there were two figures, not one, night and day but so happy in each other.

Maybe that memory is now overlaid with someone else's, brighter and more clearly fixed in your mind's eye, but it doesn't change the truth of the matter. That moment, that picture, has always bound you and your aunt together, from that first moment all those years ago. The only two people left in the world, now, who knew what it was like, truly, to love Lily Evans.

Because, that is the moment by which you will always know what love is, what if looks and feels like. And you will always now be tied to your aunt, forever more, even if you never lay eyes on her again, which is more than likely these days, because you are now truly the only two people left in the world who loved Lily Evans. Just Lily Evans, not Lily Potter.

You stare down at the slick dark stone, so silent and quiet and somehow simultaneously spine chilling and awe-inspiringly impressive, much like the man buried beneath it.

One word, etched carefully in a glowing red, slowly forms across the face of the tomb.

L&amp;S

Truthfully though, you will always hate your aunt more than a little, just as you will probably always hate your once most hated professor, although rather less that you do your aunt perhaps.

And yet, you will also always know that they, like you, loved your mother. That one undeniable, inexorable fact will always bind the three of you together, just as a photograph once bound them all together in your mind's eye.

And that fact, no matter how long you live, will always make you love them as well, more than just a very little.

L&amp;S

You never knew your mother. You never got the chance to. And no matter how hard you try, you can never really know her now, not really. All you can really know, in the end, with any true degree with certainty, is that she was loved.

You will always love them for that.

L&amp;S

You are twenty five and holding your daughter for the first time. She yawns quietly and opens her eyes long enough for flashes of brown to shine up at you. You are enchanted.

Let's call her Lily, you say. Just Lily.

You hold your daughter tenderly out to your wife, and you can't help but think, she has her mother's eyes.


	2. What do we see

Harry is running, his sneakers pounding with soft rhythmic thumps on slick stones, remnants of the latest overflow from the boys toilets in the 1st floor corridor, a regular enough occurrence to time the season by. Polished posh shoes bang loudly behind him, pounding the same familiar rhythm as Dudley's old all-star trainers that never got handed down to Harry because even virtually destroyed they were too expensive for freaks like the Dursley's nephew to be seen in.

Harry had hated those trainers.

Funny how you can literally travel to another world and nothing really changes.

Smack! Slippery tiles and too large shoes never mixed well when he was five, and apparently adding a decade makes little difference either way. Harry slowly raises his head, dread pulsing through every muscle, because he just knows, it would just be his luck…

Fathomless black depths regard him dispassionately, a gaze so familiar by now that he knows it perhaps better than his own reflection.

A rather undignified scuffle heralds the arrival of his pursuit, three teenage bodies crashing into each other in a rather ungainly mass that confirms Harry's sneakingly certain suspicion that he wasn't running from the fabulous ferret and two stooges. Hardly surprising, not Malfoy's style. Far too undignified.

An elegant eyebrow arches delicately, causing Harry to raise his chin firmly, careful to maintain eye-contact in the loudest silent fuck you he can manage with smudges of Uncle Vernon bouncing around the dim corridor walls like bad afterimages. Still, he can't help but muse, damn the man would make a good Vulcan.

It isn't until nearly an hour later, 50 points and three detentions poorer, that Harry takes the time to wonder how on earth his muggle hating Professor knows what a Vulcan is.

H&amp;S

Severus watches a small figure run haphazardly in front of a passing lorry, miraculously missing it by a hair, barely checking his pace. Long moments later, the reason for his reckless haste becomes apparent as a pack of distinctly huffing, slightly older brats chase the distinctly stunted version of a primary schooler that just slipped through the gaps in the park fence and rabbited headlong towards a small, desolate playground boasting all of two lonely swings, one of which looks rather suspect.

To Severus' not at all surprise, but admittedly slight consternation, the pursuing hulks gamely punch their way through the rotten wood in hot pursuit, bearing down on the boy like hounds to a scent.

From his position carefully roosting atop a tree like a giant invisible black owl, Severus can just make out a flash of green disappearing behind the reeds by the muddy pond trying hard to be classified as a puddle rather than any form of proper home for the local duck population.

S&amp;H

Harry is five the first time he truly fears Dudley. He's never liked his larger cousin, as long as he can remember, and he's sure even before that. He can never remember trying to be friends though, so he can never really cast all the blame on Dudley, he supposes, but his cousin is still a right prat either way.

This time hardly changes his opinion. It's Dudley's sixth birthday, and naturally Aunt Petunia took the opportunity to invite all the neighbor's over, and promptly loses her son in the chaos.

Looking back, his Aunt did that alarmingly frequently. Apparently being a parent isn't something that can be selectively turned on and off, as in his Aunt's case it just seems to have been missing altogether.

Being nearly a head shorter than Dud, despite their all of two month age disparity, coupled with the addition of the rather rabbit like Piers and some other non-descript thugs in junior training, rather justifies Harry's fear on later reflection. Not that he thought much about justifications then.

When running from bullies, the best line of defense is usually a running mantra of RUN in Harry's experience, which is by no means inconsiderable.

He's so busy implementing this philosophy that he's almost out of the park entirely before he notices his pursuers are suspiciously silent. A hasty chanced glance brings Harry to a stuttering halt, spinning carefully in a bewildered circle, well away from any available cover. Harry shakes his head, surveying the suspiciously empty park for another moment, then another. Nothing.

Later, locked in his cupboard listening to Dudley recount for the fifth time how the Freak did something Freaky, I just know it Mum, Harry pauses to wonder for a moment at the chances of sneaking into Dudley's second bedroom later to find his discarded bird book.

Harry's never heard of black owls frequenting Surrey before.

H&amp;S

"Mr. Potter."

His voice sounds like silk. It's an admittedly groggy thought, brought on by Ron's latest brilliant plan to find out how precisely Malfoy is the heir of Slytherin and clear Harry's name from being stained with dreaded taint of snakey green, but it's still the most relevant thing in Harry's mind when he startles into wakefulness to find his eyeballs less than an inch from Snape's. Somehow, their noses aren't brushing.

Harry is three years too young to know enough to worry about guarding his thoughts from Snape, as if he ever could anyway, but that does nothing to stop the tremor of fear that shakes its way into existence across his chest. Harry trained himself to control his outward appearance by second grade, the dangers of detection via teacher permanently imprinted into his back by his uncle, but somehow, tiredness or fear or lethargy to blame, a slight tremor escapes into his fingers.

Snape slams his hands down on the desk inches from Harry's small fingers, using the momentum to gracefully glide halfway back across the room before Harry's really noticed he's started moving away, slamming Harry's textbook open with a wave of his hand, insults about laziness and Gryffindor arrogance providing an atmospheric soundtrack to the resulting discussion of pickled slug brains, but somehow in all that brilliant choreography it still doesn't escape Harry's notice that for one second, before that brilliantly flourished back turning, Snape's eyes lingered ever so slightly on Harry's hands.

Nor does he fail to notice, despite the rest of the classes' depressingly familiar mass amnesia, that in all that disparaging mess, Snape failed to take a single point.

Or assign even one detention.

S&amp;H

He watches the boy, that September, on that fateful welcoming feast of '91 when memory is so thick in the air it seems to almost suffocate the very candelabras on the walls.

Severus watches the flames burn in straight yellow blooms, not a single gutter or flicker as Albus' magic superimposes stillness on living, supposedly untameable flame with barely a flick of his hand. Severus can sympathize, the squeeze of a wizened hand around his soul a feeling that even a decade of time and benedictionally doled out comfort can quite ease entirely.

Watching eager but so timid green eyes stare at piles of food like a starving man's at a feast, Severus allows himself a flicker of sympathy for more than just the candlelight.

Then memory prowls back in like a particularly dark old friend and throws a bucket of water on the flame of caring.

Still, he can never quite bring himself to stop watching all together.

H&amp;S

"I HATE YOU!"

Harry's surprisingly never shouted that at anyone before, not even as a little boy when he went through a blink-and-you'll-literally-miss-it rebellious stage when he was about eight. The memories are too blurry to ever quite remember which side of his birthday it was one, but he's sure he would have physical proof of ever uttering such a thing to the Dursley's, even if a concussion later deleted the original recollection of it.

He didn't even shout it at Sirius, back when the world was simple and wrong and red and gold.

But none of that matters now, because Sirius is dead and gone and unburiable and Harry thinks if he never sees another cat clock again he just might self-combust and he wishes the room was full of the things and Snape won't stop starring.

"I hate you!" It's no more or less satisfying a second time, and Harry had been aiming for venomous but his only model is currently standing motionlessly precisely outside of arm's reach in sentinel-like position before Grimmauld's ancient heavy fire grate, and the man just won't move.

It's a full hour before McGonagall comes to get him, and Harry makes good use of it, throwing every insult he can think of at Snape, and a few he's heard from Uncle Vernon just for good measure. He's never quite sure why he never broke the careful safe distance Snape imposed by his vigil. He reassures himself then that it was because he was afraid of what the man might do, but on recollection molten hot rage burned too loud in his mind in those endless minutes for fear to ever even consider entering the equation. Harry faced his Godfather's condemner like a true Gryffindor.

He thinks he should have been prouder of that, than he ever really is afterwards.

Still, somewhere in all that avalanche of rage and pain and loss, Harry can never quite look back on that memory and be reminded of anything but himself, four years old and small enough to be two, standing parade straight for hours, not daring to move or else. Just standing and taking it.

It still takes him a very long time to wonder who Snape was truly seeing that day.

S&amp;H

Severus' mother dies when he is fourteen, succumbing unsurprisingly to his father's ever-present drink, a blown light and dark lane ending in scratches for his too inebriated to see straight pro-genitor and a smashed skull for his long-suffered mother.

Albus is the one to tell him, offering the news matter of factly and candy free, perched carefully on his desk just far enough above the stunned boy to be a little intimidating, and yet rather more comforting.

Severus doesn't cry. He doesn't scream either. He just nods mechanically in all the right places, face tipped respectfully down. He's eighteen months too young to be angry and hurt enough to risk mouthing off to the man who represents his only chance at salvation, from his father and the rest of the world.

So he doesn't scream. Not matter how much he wants too.

Albus doesn't hug him either. He will one day, fifteen years too late, but not then, not when it might have made all the difference in the world. Might. Eighteen months later, Severus will swear it wouldn't have.

Eighteen years later, he's not so sure.

But Albus also doesn't move, not until Severus does. He doesn't know how long exactly that was, but he knows it was long enough to mean something. What he's never quite sure.

H&amp;S

It was the same species of deer.

When Harry is seven, his class does a unit on woodland animals. His teacher is positively batty about foxes, so most of the month is spent learning everything anyone ever knew about Vulpini, but somewhere in there, Harry catches a glimpse of a woodland deer. He loves it on sight, his uncle's ban on any form of Disney not-withstanding.

Harry thinks he might have enjoyed the class more if it wasn't for his teacher's rather persistent penchant for constantly comparing Harry to some nephew of hers from long ago, whom he apparently looked enough like to be his ghost or twin or son or something. Harry is used to being everyone's kick-the-cat stand-in, but it's the first time in his young life anyone whose last name doesn't begin with D has called him a Freak to his face, and that breaks something inside little Harry he hadn't known still existed, even at the tender age of seven.

He never does like foxes much after that.

Still, six years later, watching himself catapult a stag across a lake to save a soul, Harry can't help but be enchanted.

Four years later still, following a silvery doe that seems strangely like an angel towards a frozen salvation at the end of the world, the small part of Harry that is still desperately eager to earn even the smallest amount of praise from an adult, can't help but think Ms. Prince would be proud.

Because it was the same species of deer.

S&amp;H

"Look at me." As near last words go, it leaves a lot to be desired. Still, those dying of Snake mauling can't be picky Severus finds, the potent narcotic effects of Nagini's venom lending a rather surreal hilarity to his final moments of thinking.

Because of course it would end like this. Of course it would.

Severus has been starring at other people all his life. His father never tired of calling him on it, calling him a freak for it, no matter how good he became at starring at the ground.

It was the first thing Petunia Evans ever noticed about him, and the first thing she hated about him. The feeling was always entirely mutual, even thirty odd years later.

At school, the Marauders honed the trait into an art, one which would one day keep Severus alive, as well as making him the best spy the world has probably ever seen.

He's far from grateful.

He watches Albus, whether he's eleven or twenty-one or thirty-six. When his headmaster is in the room, his gaze never drifts far from the scattered super nova of Albus' carefully tamed magical signature.

Severus can't quite see Auras, but he knows for a fact that his own never quite shakes the smudges of Albus' magic.

"Severus…Please." It was a statement, not even a prearranged code. It was cryptic enough to be damning, cold enough to somehow be comforting.

Severus Snape lives for precisely one year and three days longer than Albus Dumbledore, and he never quite stops seeing twinkling blue eyes.

H&amp;S

Snape has always watched him. Harry notices it on his first day, the carefully considering glancing stare of obsidian eyes raising alarm bells far quicker and more painful than the flashing sting of his scar. Being noticed is never a good thing, where Harry comes from.

Still, nothing ever quite comes of it, not in the way he was truly expecting, cruelty and petty meanness aside.

Snape never quite stops watching though. Neither does Harry.

Watching his most hated Professor carefully choke out the last thing he will ever say, a rote phrase Harry has grown to hate in his teen years but somehow would give anything to hear just one more time in that moment, he can't quite bring himself to look away.

Closing Snape's eyes might be the hardest thing he ever does, because for the first time since Sirius died, Harry feels truly alone.

S&amp;H

The wizarding world doesn't really have celebrities, not in the same way the muggle one does, but there are still famous people who reporters never tire of photographing. Harry should know, he's one of them after all.

Harry doesn't do crushes, and he's quite sure he's 100 percent straight, but even Ginny teases him about a midlife crisis when he becomes more obsessed with Lily's latest music crush than his twelve year old daughter is.

Spending countless hours pouring over trashy wizi-celeb glosses does nothing to silence the teasing, but Harry can't help himself.

It's not that he finds the man particularly attractive. Although he is a rather good singer, haunting and baritone and truly blindingly talented.

It isn't a crush, nor is it an obsession, so Harry never actually moves the album cover he perches carefully on an edge of his desk. Nor does it ever quite get dusty enough to truly obscure the black eyes that pierce out from the cover either.

H&amp;S

When Severus is ten, his mother takes him to visit an obscure maiden aunt of hers. The visit ends abruptly when Severus accidently levitates the fox-patterned teapot just high enough to make a rather spectacular smash when it hits the floor again a moment later.

They never do hear from that Aunt again, which really is more down to his mother whipping out her wand the moment the F word enters the conversation directed towards Severus, because Sev has never even seen his mother's wand before, but apparently her batty old Aunt Prince is easier to stand up to than her muggle husband, and he knows that isn't really fair, but somehow it never quite stops smarting.

Severus never does quite manage to see a fox again without thinking of her.

S&amp;H

He watches a pair of wide green eyes slowly blink around a cavernous hall, tracking his every move as if Severus were a cobra coiled to strike, and for just a moment, the ghosts lift from his eyes, and he doesn't see James Potter, doesn't see Petunia Evans or Sirius Black or Albus Dumbledore or his own greatest shame and eternal damnation all rolled into one. He doesn't even see Lily.

For one single, fleeting instant, he looks at Harry Potter, and all he can see is himself, eleven years old and bitterly aware that the brief happiness he had known in life was over forever.

And for one moment, just long enough for something to flicker alive somewhere deep in his chest, Severus wants to change that for this boy. For one moment, before learned as a means of survival to live by selfishness resurfaces, Severus looks at the bane of his existence, the living example of his greatest mistake, his greatest sin and bitterest regret, and only sees a little boy with green eyes.

In that single moment, he just sees Harry.


End file.
